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This week, it
continues with Book 2: U.S. Acres Counts Its Chickens.

The strip gets a
lot better once the rest of the cast shows up.

This might be an average strip to the layman....but Garfield and
Friends fans already recognize its significance. It mentions
"Planet Clarion."

For some reason,
every single alien that appeared in a Garfield and Friends
cartoon said it was from "Planet Clarion," and I can't
find anything it would come from, other than this one strip. I
guess the word just stuck with Davis.....

Top strip:
You'll see more on this later. I don't know how many drawings
Davis received of the "thing behind the wall," but it's
a good bet most of them got lost in the mail. When I first saw
this strip I thought "Jim Davis, In Care Of This
Newspaper" was the address. I couldn't have been the only
kid to think so.

Bottom strip: An
early "epic" continuity involved hypnotically curing
Wade of fear. It sounds like a great idea to use for a U.S. Acres
TV cartoon, and many other strips were redone as cartoons, but
this story was only adapted into the second half of another
story. Kind of a waste.....

Wow, how
unOrsonly of him.

Roy would do this to Wade on TV in
Season 1's "The Worm Turns."

Well, THAT was inevitable.....

Yes, it's Lanolin. Keep reading....

Right off the bat, Lanolin made her presence known as the meanest
thing around the farm, and the only one who could put Roy in his
place. Her viciousness was toned down for the series, making her
less funny. Roy was still the wisecracking joker who thought he
was all that, but we rarely ever saw Lanolin slap his feathered
behind back to reality, which was the funniest part of it. Shame.

The biggest difference between the strip and the TV show (besides
the cat and dog you'll see later) is Bo. The strip version of Bo
is defined by one word: stupid. He would frequently walk off
cliffs and misinterpret words.
TV Bo isn't necessarily dumb....instead, they made him a surfer
dude who said "whoa" and "man" in every
sentence. That's not the original Bo. Jim Davis did have a hand
in the development of U.S. Acres for television, so he must have liked
the change. Surfer sheep, however, aren't as funny as stupid
sheep.

With this strip, Booker began his ruthless worm-hunting career.
Worm gags took up much of the strip later on.

Here's Wade talking to the thing in the hole again. It's unknown
if this is someone's design, or if Davis came up with this guy on
his own. But boy howdy, what an interesting week this would
be....

Max never appeared again. After seeing this, I wanted him in a
cartoon badly.

This is the beginning of a side of Sheldon the series never
showed. From this point on, Sheldon became a philosopher and
intellectual, musing on the mysteries of life from atop a little
dirt mound. Not that there weren't still cheap egg jokes in the
strip.

The top strip is yet another "first appearance"....of
the Worm Family. That's yet another concept that stayed in the
strip, and you'll find out more about it next.....